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7:30 pm, Wednesday, Feburary 8th, 2017
Fairmont Lounge, St. John's College
2111 Lower Mall, UBC
Politics, Morality, Innovation and
Fraud
in Physical Science and Technology
Prof. Jed Buchwald,
History, California Institute of Technology
The pressures of politics, moral convictions, the desire to be first in
innovation, and the potential dangers of unwitting error are all factors
at work in the history of science and technology. Historians think and
argue best through stories, so Ive chosen several tales which exemplify
one or more of these factors, some reaching back nearly 200 years. The
first concerns the depletion of the ozone layer (the "ozone hole"); the
second the discovery of electric waves by Heinrich Hertz in 1888; the
third concerns the controlled production of electromagnetic radiation by
Marconi and Fleming in the early 1900s; the fourth portrays Fraunhofers
discovery and use of spectral lines in the 1810s; and our final case
describes a bitter controversy between the Baron Hermann von Helmholtz and
Friedrich Zöllner in the 1890s.
To learn more please visit his
webpage.
Additional resources for this talk: slides, video.
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